Putting History to the Test at Kent State University
Instron joins Dr. Metin Eren and Dr. Michelle Bebber from Kent State University's Experimental Archaeology Lab to discuss the important role their Instron universal testing system plays in their innovative research.
[00:00:05] Speaker Doctor Metin Eren: Today we are at, the Kent State University experimental Archeology Lab, The Kent State University experimental archeology lab, recreates and then reverse engineers ancient technologies. I am Doctor Metin Eren. I'm a full professor here at Kent State University. I focus on, stone technology and ballistics.
[00:00:26] Speaker Michelle Bebber: My name is Michelle Bebber. I'm an assistant professor here at Kent State University. I co-direct our experimental archeology lab, which I think is an amazing job.
[00:00:36] Speaker Doctor Metin Eren: A lot of archeologists will dig artifacts out of the ground and sort of guess at how a tool worked. We take it a step further. We recreate that tool, and then we test out how it worked. And, a large part of that is our own Instron materials tester.
[00:00:56] Speaker Doctor Metin Eren: I think to like materials testing is so vital for archeology because the archeological record is materials. Right. By definition, the archeological record that's all we have is material culture. And what we try to do here is unravel that material culture, as much as we can. The Instron is great because it facilitates creativity in how we do the testing. And we've never there's never been a question that we have not been able to adapt our Instron to.
[00:01:32] Speaker Michelle Bebber: We currently have a student who's very interested in ancient fishing practices, and he has replicated,
a variety of bone fish hooks, like those we see 20 - 30,000 years ago. He's also producing shellfish hooks, which are quite common around the world. And so he's actually using the Instron to test the sort of just the durability and the strength of various types of fish hooks.
[00:01:58] Speaker Doctor Metin Eren: This is I mean, really the the premier experimental archeology lab in North America. And to to test all the different materials we do is, is unique. And again, to have our own Instron, not only has been extremely beneficial for us to unravel the past, but we have colleagues now.
[00:02:18] Speaker Michelle Bebber: Yeah.
[00:02:19] Speaker Doctor Metin Eren: Across the archeological disciplines, more archeologists are getting Instrons, because I think they just incredibly value what Instron can bring.
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